Battlestar Galactica spin-off Caprica was never going to have an easy start in life. Born in the shadow of its towering parent – which is itself a remake of Glen A. Larson’s award-winning 1978 series – it had to do justice to the elegant and complex universe of BSG execs Ronald D. Moore and David Eick while exploring the artificial-intelligence theme from a new angle that would benefit from a more earth-bound setting.
And it had to do these things while staggering under the weight of an inevitably down-beat ending: whatever obstacles the characters will have surmounted by the finale, how can we celebrate with them when we know it will all end in a holocaust a few decades later?
The first nine episodes drew criticisms of leaden pacing and more plot threads than the story needed. Season 1.5, which picks up where the things were left with the Zoe avatar (Alessandra Torresani) destroyed and Amanda (Paula Malcomson) gone off a bridge, shows its main characters – bereaved fathers Daniel Graystone (Eric Stoltz) and his nemesis Joseph Adama (Esai Morales) – sinking deeper into moral and ethical mire as they compromise their honour to fulfil their ideals of technological advancement and tribal loyalty respectively.
Meanwhile, villainess Clarice Willow’s (Polly Walker) fanaticism is shown to have reached new heights with the discovery of her Apotheosis program, a vision of eternal life for suicide bombers using Zoe’s avatar program. By showing the moral decline of its already flawed main characters, Season 1.5 suggests that the destruction of humanity as a whole is inevitable, a consequence of the hubris and vindictiveness that are encoded into everyone.
At times, in this half of the season even more than in the first, the show seems to propound giving up on human beings altogether. Both Daniel and Joseph have moments of heroism and moments when we understand why they embark on the murderous choices they make, but at other times we are purposely distanced from them – particularly from Daniel – through the obscure machinations of the plot and then it’s easy to see them as snakelike individuals who are strangely banal in their pursuit of their own interests, no different from the corrupt Guatrau or the murderous terrorists. Similarly, characters you thought you knew and whom you sympathised with for their apparent innocence are shown to be corruptible in ways you might not have anticipated, effectively whipping the carpet from under your feet.
Inevitably by the finale there are still a few loose ends and things that are never explained. Towards the end of the season a once-important character is forgotten about both by the other characters and seemingly by the creators of the series. While this doesn’t derail the plot, it is disorientating for the viewer. Another character exhibits a mysterious power but once this has served its purpose of getting her and her friends out of a couple of sticky situations it is never explained or referred to again.
There are also inconsistencies with the history laid down in Battlestar Galactica. There it is the final five Cylons who come up with the resurrection technology, but in Caprica Season 1.5 Cylon ‘resurrection’ is shown to be a human invention. This is jarring to devotees of BSG. Furthermore, by emphasising human ingenuity at the expense of Cylon creativity the show’s writers undermine one of the themes that made BSG so interesting: where do you draw the line between natural and artificial intelligence when artificial intelligence becomes capable of matching humanity for creative brilliance?
Caprica opened with scenes of shootings and human sacrifice in V-world to show the dark side of decadent Caprican society, but in Season 1.5 we are shown the troubled faces of two other colonies; Gemenon and Tauron. Gemenon is a hostile dustbowl peopled by fanatics, while Tauron (strictly speaking the Tauron of Joseph’s childhood thirty odd years before) is rural and war-torn, reminiscent of the Sicily of Coppola’s Godfather films – one of those societies in which the same wars, injustices and tribal vendettas reoccur in each generation. There are deep cultural and economic rifts between the colonies, making the introduction of a weapon like the Cylon into such a divided society even more of a risk than it would be to a less factious one.
At times, the theme of the conception of a new order of intelligence gets lost among all the other elements thrown into the series: the monotheism versus polytheism conflict whose causes are only ever hinted at; the avatars’ project to clean up New Caprica; the V-world city; Zoe avatar’s need to prove to herself and to the Tamara avatar that being Zoe’s avatar isn’t the same as being Zoe and that she isn’t therefore responsible for the act of terrorism that killed Zoe and Tamara among others…
Not surprisingly with such a multifarious plot, Caprica lacks the clean momentum of Battlestar Galactica. It is difficult to say exactly what it is about and some of the questions it asks – ‘is a person the sum of their memories?’ being one of the more interesting – are only partially answered, if at all, by the show’s conclusion.
However, Caprica remains true to its parent series in complexity of ideas and the society it depicts is an interesting one with many parallels to our own. If you want to prolong the BSG experience, Caprica is certainly worth checking out, but keep an open mind and a willingness to risk disappointment and frustration at times.
Released on DVD on Monday 4th July 2011 by Universal Playback.